Merger By Matrimony Read online

  Had she forgotten somewhere along the way that she was a woman? The thought made her even more dejected. She thought of her stepcousin with her beautifully manicured nails painted the pink of candy floss and felt graceless and gauche in comparison.

  Henri thinks that I’m attractive, she thought to herself. But did he really? Or did he just think that she was the best of the bunch?

  Five hours spent on Oxford Street and the King’s Road was no sop to her deflated spirits. She spent a great deal of time wondering which shops were worth visiting and looking around her in a bewildered, confused fashion. Several times she had literally been swept along by the crowds of shoppers like a tadpole caught in a downstream current.

  The pace was swift and left no room for uncertain young girls with no particular agenda aside from gathering the skeleton of a wardrobe together.

  In the end, she found herself outside Harvey Nichols, took a deep breath and handed herself over to the experience of a shop assistant. She did her best not to convert the vast quantities of money she was spending on clothes into an amount that would have bought a lot more important things in Panama.

  She bought two skirts and jackets that would do for when she went into the company to work, jeans and shirts and jumpers for casual wear, and shoes that made her feet feel ten sizes smaller and looked, to her unaccustomed eyes, positively ludicrous. She threw caution to the winds and indulged in lingerie that wasn’t sensible. She allowed herself to be persuaded into two dresses which, the shop assistant assured her were perfect, with a firmness that defied contradiction—especially from someone who had no idea what might or might not suit her.

  ‘But they’re tight,’ Destiny protested weakly, looking at the black dress and the deep green dress with concern. Tight clothes were anathema in blistering heat and she had never possessed anything that clung. Least of all clung to her curves. ‘And they’re short.’

  ‘They’re sexy,’ the shop assistant explained, casting a critical eye over her victim and pushing her towards a changing booth.

  Destiny emerged feeling like a tree inappropriately clad in a bikini, but when she looked in the mirror she realised with a twinge of pleasure that she was nothing like a tree. Tall, yes, but slim and with curves that had rarely seen the light of day.

  Her legs seemed to stretch on and on and on, long and brown and slender, and her breasts, not camouflaged by baggy clothes, jutted out provocatively.

  ‘Of course, you should get your hair cut into something fashionable,’ she was told.

  It was shoulder-length, and years of DIY home cuts had lent it a rough, uneven edge, all the more apparent because it was so incredibly blonde.

  ‘I like my hair,’ Destiny said. ‘I’m not going to have it short.’ Back in her work gear in Panama, stripped of these wildly glamorous plumes that seemed to turn her into a sexy woman, of sorts, and with a cropped haircut, she really would look like one of the men. No chance. Her mother had always insisted that she have some length to her hair and she wasn’t about to abandon that piece of advice now.

  But buy the clothes she did. The whole lot. She also bought make-up, which took ages because the choice of colours and shades of everything almost defied belief. At the end of it, the shopping bags seemed as heavy to carry back to the house as a dozen bags of medicine, school-books, containers of plant specimens and the kayak rolled into one.

  It was worth it, though.

  She knew that when, at seven-thirty, she looked at her reflection and what gazed back at her was a striking woman in a short, tight black dress, wearing smart black, albeit hideously uncomfortable, shoes and a face that was a blend of subtle colours. Blushing Pink on her lips, which made her tan stand out, a hint of Passionate Petal blusher and length enhancing mascara that made her eyelashes look as though they had taken growth hormones.

  She would not give Callum Ross another opportunity to sneer at her for being impossible—which really boiled down to unfeminine.

  She wasn’t dressing for him, she insisted to herself, but neither was she going to be treated like someone whose lack of sophistication was an excuse for insults. She had no idea how long she would be in London—two weeks, three, maybe more—and while she was here she would damn well change her colours to match her surroundings. Animals did it and so could she.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DESTINY felt a surge of disproportionate disappointment when she opened the door to Callum, bursting with smug satisfaction at the figure she presented, and was greeted merely with, ‘Oh, good. You’re ready. I can’t stand waiting around for a woman to get her act together.’

  She slammed the door behind her and preceded him to the car. ‘Did you bring whatever paperwork you wanted me to have a look at?’ One minute he was full of scathing asides on her appearance and inability to cope with life in the fast track, and then, when she did make an effort, she noticed petulantly, he didn’t even have the good grace to comment on it!

  ‘In the car.’ His eyes flicked rapidly over her as she folded herself into the car seat and he added perfunctorily, ‘Had a successful day shopping, then, I take it?’

  ‘Very successful, thank you.’

  He looked away, turned the key in the ignition and the powerful car roared into life.

  ‘And not too much useless tramping in and out of stores?’ he quizzed her with the ghost of a smile on his mouth.

  Destiny, pressed against the car door, attempted to compose her features into a mask of unrevealing politeness. If he had the slightest idea how much his opinion meant to her, she had no doubt that he would ruthlessly use the knowledge to get what he wanted.

  ‘Quite a bit of useless tramping in and out of stores, actually.’ He was wearing a plain-coloured shirt with some logo almost invisibly embroidered on the front pocket, and dark trousers. She could feel herself going into an undignified trance as she feasted her eyes on him, and with a little twinge of guilt she dragged them away and stared out of the window. She was already beginning to get used to the fact that no part of London was free from crowds. Even at this hour of the evening there seemed to be no let-up from the hordes of people in search of open shops and entertainment. Did no one sleep here? she wondered.

  ‘Mmm. To be expected, considering you don’t know where to go. You should have listened to me and gone along with Steph.’

  ‘Does she always listen to you?’

  ‘Most people do,’ he said comfortably.

  ‘Would that be because you’re a bully?’

  He frowned at her, and his brief lapse in concentration caused him to brake suddenly behind the black cab in front.

  ‘Could you try not to distract me when I’m driving? London is a bloody obstacle course. The last thing I need is for the two of us to land up in hospital.’

  ‘Which would be my fault because I’m trying to make polite conversation?’

  ‘Telling me that I’m a bully is your way of making polite conversation? I don’t run around yelling at people and telling them what to do and how to live their lives. I’m very reasonable and usually right.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Next to her, Callum simmered silently, barely seeing the crowds overflowing the pavements as they drove through the busy theatre district. He dared not keep his foot on the accelerator and risk another glance at her without opening himself up to a possible crash, but he was itching to. He wasn’t idiotic or egotistical enough to imagine that she had put on that sexy little black number for his benefit, but it was having a roller-coaster effect on his senses. Dressed like that, she even smelt more womanly. The neckline was scooped and cut low enough to reveal the swelling roundness of her breasts. Not even the thought of Stephanie, with her childishly boyish figure, was enough to put a brake on his wandering imagination. It wasn’t disloyalty, he told himself sternly. It was a natural male response to look at a beautiful woman clad in precious little. In fact, he continued his inner dialogue, while his mind carried on its pleasurable games, it would be unnatural if the woman sitting next
to him didn’t evoke a response. He was a red-blooded man of the world merely appreciating what nature had to offer. He was in the middle of reasoning to himself that in fact the desire to feast his eyes on her strikingly tall, voluptuous and entirely womanly body was very similar to a desire to feast his eyes on anything that was aesthetically pleasing, be it a piece of architecture, a stick of furniture or a houseplant in bloom for that matter, when he became aware that she was talking to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked where we were going to eat.’

  ‘Oh. Just an Italian restaurant I frequent. Five minutes away.’ A quick shift of his eyes gathered in brown hands resting languidly on her lap and crossed legs. ‘Should make a change from staying in.’ He realised when he drew in a shuddering breath that his iron self-control was slipping. ‘So tell me about what you do in Panama,’ he said, steering the conversation into safe waters that might drown out his wildly soaring thought patterns. ‘You never mentioned what you do in the evenings. I don’t suppose there’s much happening.’

  ‘Depends what you call “not much happening”,’ Destiny told him. ‘If you’re asking whether there’s much by way of expensive restaurants, clubs and hectic night life, then, no, it’s the most boring place on the face of the earth.’

  ‘A simple answer would have been enough.’ He pulled sharply into a vacant space that had suddenly become free then turned to face her, one hand lingering on the gear lever between them. ‘No need to launch into a biting attack.’

  Destiny stared at him for a moment and it occurred to her that she was never sarcastic. Now and again, she and Henri would have little ribbing sessions with one another, and they were accustomed to dissecting the magazines that accumulated dust in one of the storage cabins with cutting jokiness, but that was as far as it went. Callum had asked her once before where she had dredged her sarcasm from, but in all truth it was a talent that had only been brought to light with the arrival of the man now sitting next to her, watching her with those cool, disturbing blue eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised.

  ‘Are you?’ He didn’t give her time to answer, instead twisting round to get out of the car, and she did the same.

  ‘I feel very sorry for whatever man is in your life,’ he remarked, holding the door open for her, and she snapped back,

  ‘Funnily enough, I’m only sarcastic when I’m around you.’

  ‘I’ve had a variety of effects on women in my lifetime,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘but sarcasm was never one of them.’

  Destiny refused to collaborate in his sneering at her expense. Instead, she held her head high and strode ahead of him into the restaurant, for once not feeling overawed by her surroundings.

  For starters, she wasn’t dressed like someone who had accidentally forgotten the basic rules of fashion.

  For another thing, she was so conscious of the man behind her, talking to the head waiter, that she barely noticed her surroundings, never mind how she fitted into them.

  She was aware, however, that more than one set of eyes had swivelled in her direction, and she felt a little jolt of pleasure at the minor sensation she had aroused. Even the waiter, as usual a good head shorter than her, was doing his best to hide his interest.

  ‘Your skirt is so damned short—’ he leaned across the table as soon as they were seated and looked at her through narrowed eyes ‘—that even the waiter’s staring.’

  ‘It was recommended to me by the sales lady,’ Destiny pointed out coolly. ‘She didn’t appear to think that it was too short.’

  ‘Well, she should be shot. If you belonged to me, I wouldn’t let you leave the house in that get-up.’

  He sat back as they were handed two oversized menus, giving her a few seconds for her simmer to reach near boiling point.

  ‘If I belonged to you? If I belonged to you? People aren’t possessions!’ She stared at him and he gazed back at her, his dark brows meeting in a frown.

  ‘Any woman that was mine would be my possession, body and soul.’

  ‘And how would you feel if she felt the same way about you? That she wanted you to dress down because you looked too sexy in what you wear?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you think I’m sexy?’ he asked, turning her well-meaning point on its head and giving her a slow, amused smile.

  She muttered something under her breath and resorted to the relative safety of her menu, behind which she could hide. Why ever had she thought that these huge menus were a bit of a joke when in fact they served a very useful purpose as shield from a nerve-jangling dinner companion?

  ‘Well, you still haven’t answered my question. Do you?’ He pulled down the menu with one finger and peered at her over the top of it, his amused grin much broader now.

  ‘You’re an attractive enough man,’ she told him—because an outright lie would have probably turned the amused grin into a guffaw of disbelieving laughter. ‘If you go for your type of look.’

  ‘My type of look?’

  He looked neither taken aback nor offended by her postscript. Of course, he would she thought irritably. Hadn’t she discovered that his ego was roughly the size of Panama? If Stephanie ever sought her advice on the subject, she would tell her in no uncertain terms that scooting around him and never answering back was a sure-fire way to add to the problem.

  ‘I can’t read the menu with you dragging it down.’

  ‘Have the fresh fish. It’s the best thing on the menu.’

  ‘There you go again,’ she reminded him, ‘being bossy again,’ and blushed when she realised that he had been winding her up.

  ‘So what is my type of look?’ he persisted, still grinning and still tugging her menu down so that she couldn’t conveniently hide behind it.

  ‘Well, if you must know, it’s that obvious tall, dark-haired, good-looking kind of look.’

  ‘Ah! You mean as opposed to the short, fair-haired, unappealing kind of look…’ He released the menu so that her glare of infuriation was lost on the list of starters, and by the time she had decided on what she was going to eat he had his amused gleaming expression safely under wraps.

  ‘I’ve got all the paperwork here,’ he said, whisking a two-inch wad of papers from the briefcase at the side of his chair. He pushed them across to her, then sat back to inspect her at his leisure. ‘Naturally you’ll need some information on Felt’s profit and loss over the past, say, three years. Did you bring it along with you?’

  ‘You know I didn’t.’ She glanced at the top page and found enough technical terms in the first three sentences to reduce her to bewildered dismay.

  ‘Ah, yes. You were sporting your minimalist look. Not to worry…’ He fished into his briefcase again and this time the wad was three inches thick. ‘I have everything you need right here.’

  ‘Perhaps you could just sum it all up for me and leave me with this paperwork to read over the next couple of days.’

  ‘You might not understand all the terms and sub-clauses,’ he said piously. ‘You might find that I have to explain them to you.’

  ‘I’ll try my best to get to grips with it.’

  ‘Okay. Just offering my services to speed things up a bit.’ He paused just long enough for them to order their meal, his eyes shooting up at her rejection of his fish suggestion, then leaned forward with his elbows resting on the table. ‘If you turn to page fifteen, you’ll find a listing of all my company’s assets.’

  Destiny obligingly turned to the required page and was confronted by columns of figures, none of which appeared to have under six noughts in it. His company, or rather his holdings, were hugely profitable. It didn’t take a degree in accountancy to see that.

  ‘Now, if you turn to page eighteen of the document underneath, you can have a quick look at how Felt’s been performing recently.’

  ‘Get to the point. I know they’ve been struggling over the past few months.’

  ‘Years, actually.’

  ‘Well, years, then.’<
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  ‘It’s going to require a massive injection of cash to come up to scratch. No amount of good intentions and sympathetic man-management is going to haul it out of the red.’

  Destiny was busily surveying the papers in front of her, which seemed to have a huge amount of brackets around figures. She sighed and flicked through the rest of the paperwork. Report upon report, all bearing the ominous word losses. Without the optimism of the directors, desperate to hang on to their lucrative jobs, the facts staring her in the face were sinister. She looked up to see Callum staring at her and sipping his wine.

  ‘I can see you’re beginning to get the picture.’

  ‘Derek seems to think that there’s a chance…’

  ‘Derek’s a lawyer who doesn’t want me to buy the company,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘Why? My uncle had agreed to sell…’

  ‘Because he could see sense.’

  ‘Why should Derek care one way or another?’

  ‘Because his links with that miserable uncle of yours stretch back a long way. Felt’s started as a family firm and the family firm was good to him. Unfortunately, it’s caused him to develop a very unhealthy blind spot when it comes to common sense.’

  Destiny shuffled the papers she was holding and shoved them back to him.

  ‘Why are you so keen to buy something that’s losing money hand over fist? No one else wants it, apparently, so why do you?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I see it as a worthwhile investment.’ He drained the contents of his glass in one long gulp, while his eyes flicked over her face. ‘You asked me once whether there was anything personal involved and I might just as well tell you the sordid story of your dear, generous uncle.’

  ‘He was never dear to me,’ she said swiftly. ‘I never knew him.’ She too drained her glass of wine, to ease some of the tension building up inside her.